Feb 11

Food for the Infirmary

My worst food memory from childhood was being fed milk toast when I was sick. Mom toasted and buttered some Wonder bread and poured hot whole milk on top. I remember her serving it in an oblong purple melamine bowl she had. I’m sure that’s what Grandma served Mom when she was a girl, and she thought it would help me feel better. It didn’t. Even in those days of a relatively limited palate, I resolved never to eat milk toast again. Maybe this is where my aversion to white, bland foods began.

Given our orthopedic mishaps of the last six months (my dislocated pinky, Julian’s fractured humerus), food in the short term after an injury has to meet three criteria:

  1. No cutting required at the table;
  2. Easily picked up with one hand if it’s a sandwich or finger food; and
  3. Not too gloppy, runny,  or slippery.

Number one eliminates most meats unless ground, served in a sandwich, or pot-roasted until it’s easily shredded. Number two rules out overstuffed deli or sub sandwiches, or burgers piled high with mayonnaise-based sauces and other accoutrements. Number three scratches the aforementioned burgers, along with slippery noodles. Eating peas can also be problematic, especially if you’re forced to use your non-dominant hand.

These criteria limit one’s diet significantly. However, there are workarounds so you don’t have to rely on liquid meal replacers (unless you have a wired jaw, in which case you may need to do so). Stir-fries, casseroles, and baked pastas are good options. Fish, shrimp out of the shell, and scallops are easy to eat. Seafood in the shell is not a good idea. Supermarket rotisserie chickens are usually cooked to the point of shredding, so you don’t need a knife to eat them. Soups are easily consumed. If they’re too thin to eat with a spoon (e.g., tomato soup), you can always drink them out of coffee mugs. If you’re trying to eat with your non-dominant hand, you may find it useful to put your food in a wide bowl so you have the edge to push the food onto your fork or spoon. Don’t be fixated on how you’ll look eating this way. As long as you can feed yourself, you’re fine.

Fortunately for most of us, these limitations are temporary. After recovery or adaptation, we can go back to our normal food regimens.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/02/11/food-for-the-infirmary/

Feb 11

The Wisconsin Omelet

We had some leftover bratwurst from last night’s dinner. Julian suggested chopping them up into my weekly omelet. We have now invented the Wisconsin omelet, to join the diner standards of Western and Denver omelets. Here is the recipe:

Chop up your leftover (cooked) bratwurst and frizzle in your omelet pan. Remove from pan and set aside. Whisk up your eggs as for a regular omelet. The number of eggs depends on your appetite. Pour the eggs into the pan and make your usual omelet. Just before you fold over the eggs, sprinkle the frizzled brats on one side of the omelet. Fold, finish, and serve. One brat is more than you need for a standard omelet. No worries, either use one brat for two omelets or serve the rest of the frizzled brat on the side.

For the “Full Madison” Wisconsin omelet, you can add grated cheddar cheese on top of the brats before folding the omelet. Julian (who earned his bachelors’ degree at Wisconsin) cracked, “For the Full Madison, you need brats, cheese, and beer.” I had that covered – the brats were parboiled in beer before I grilled them last night.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/02/11/the-wisconsin-omelet/

Feb 11

Julian’s Turn

Thursday night we were supposed to go to the symphony. Julian was going to take the bus downtown and meet me for dinner before the concert. As I was driving downhill from work, Julian called. He’d taken a nasty fall at the bus stop and banged his shoulder. I managed to get out of downtown and picked up some takeout for dinner on the way home. After dinner we took a drive to the nearest emergency room. Diagnosis: A broken left humerus (the upper bone in the arm). This is the first time he’s ever fractured a bone. He sees the orthopedic surgeon on Monday; in the meantime, he’s popping painkillers and icing his shoulder.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/02/11/julians-turn/

Feb 07

The Card Cull

After filing the clippings yesterday, it was time to visit the nether regions of my recipe card collection. I started jotting down recipes from magazines or other sources when I was in college and continued until it became much easier to print off a recipe from the internet. Some of these cards I hadn’t looked at since before we moved to Seattle; hence, it was high time for a little weeding.
As with the cookbook cull, the discarded recipe cards fell into several categories:

  • Missing ingredients. When we lived on the East Coast,we’d cook bluefish a lot.  It’s reasonably inexpensive, and stands up to tomatoes and other strong flavors. Unfortunately, bluefish doesn’t make it to West Coast supermarkets. (Consolation: The salmon we get here is much better than Back East.)
  • I don’t cook/eat that way anymore. Some of the 1980’s-vintage recipes were from the era when folks were trying to eat ridiculously low amounts of fat and making some grisly tradeoffs in the process. Other recipes were heavy on ingredients that I don’t keep in my home, such as margarine or shortening.
  • Dumbed-down ethnic cuisine. I can get most of the ingredients I need to make the real stuff hereabouts, so why should I suffer with sad substitutions?
  • Send in the clones. How many iterations of braised chicken with tomatoes and artichoke hearts does one need?
  • Illegible. Some of the ink was fading on the cards. And damn, did I actually write that small back in the day? No wonder Mom would complain about my letters.

At the end of the chore, I had a two-inch stack of cards that went into the recycling bin. Mission accomplished.

 

 

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/02/07/the-card-cull/

Feb 06

Snow Day Doings

As I mentioned earlier, Seattle doesn’t do snow well. The snow started falling last night near the end of the Super Bowl. My friend, the weather geek, was tracking the storm’s progress throughout the game. Fortunately, everyone got home safely. The snow was still falling when I went to bed. Julian predicted, “You may not be going to work tomorrow.”  When I looked out the window after the alarm clock rang this morning, it was still snowing. I emailed my coworkers that I wasn’t coming in and went back to bed.

Other than reading emails, I don’t work from home. I deal with confidential patient information and still fill out paper data collection forms. So I had to figure out alternative activities. No problem. I had a bunch of recipe clippings to file, which took a good part of the morning. While I was filing, I found a New York Times article from October 1989 on which Julian had scrawled a phone number. I recognized the number as that of my old lab in grad school (AWW…). We met October 14, 1989.

While I was filing, I went through the bread clippings looking for something to bake. A recipe for bialys appeared. More nostalgia: When Julian and I were first going out in Ithaca, we’d often have brunch at the Collegetown Bagels restaurant near his apartment. One of my standard orders was for hummus on a bialy. For those of you not of the New York persuasion, bialys are related to bagels with two key differences:

  1. Bialys don’t have a hole in the center; and
  2. Bagels are boiled before baking, and bialys aren’t.

The bialy dough is easy to make. While it’s rising, you chop up onions and mix them with some poppy seed and a little oil. I used olive oil and added a little bit of dried rosemary. Once the dough is risen, you press balls of dough out, wash them with egg, and press some of the onion-poppy seed mixture into the middle. Another rise, then they go into a hot oven for 20-25 minutes.

The recipe did make 12 bialys – until Julian found them.

On cue, Julian came upstairs from the office shortly after the bialys came out of the oven. “Is it bialy-eating time yet?” I said they still needed to cool, but that didn’t stop him. He split one and smeared cream cheese in the middle. He took a bite, set down the bialy, and gave me a thumbs up. Not bad for a snow day.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/02/06/snow-day-doings/

Feb 04

Super Bowl Chow

In the early years of the Super Bowl, Mad Magazine predicted that it would become a full-fledged national holiday. Little did the “usual gang of idiots” (Mad’s term, not mine) know how right they’d be. Even people who hate football will congregate with friends, heckle the commercials, watch for wardrobe malfunctions during the half time show, and consume mass quantities of chips, chicken wings, and beer.

We’ve hosted a Super Bowl party for our friends for years. We stick to our tried and true recipes for chicken wings, a baked Buffalo variant and peanut-butter-coated. In previous years we’ve also made chili; however, this year we’ll have Cuban black beans and rice. This is another of our greatest hits. I made the beans today, since there won’t be much time to do so tomorrow. Once the beans are cooked, you stir in a sofrito containing onion, garlic, bell pepper, cilantro, tomato paste, and Sazon Goya. My tear ducts were working overtime while I was mincing the onions, as I wasn’t wearing contact lenses. Putting on my glasses didn’t help.

We usually offer a little drama when we host. Our female cat, Neli, arrived shortly before the Super Bowl six years ago. Several of the known twenty-somethings nearly came to blows wanting to hold onto her. Our first year hosting at Casa Sammamish, a shelf in the kitchen cabinet collapsed when I was trying to get out a serving bowl. Scads of dishes fell and broke around me. We managed to clean things up before our guests arrived. A year later, the water heater chose to die just before the game. Luckily, the landlord replaced it in the nick of time.

Am I rooting for either team this year? Not really. I’m hoping for good food and the company of friends. The game is secondary.

 

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/02/04/super-bowl-chow/

Feb 04

Thanks to Scientists

My mother sent me an article from her local paper,The Oswego Valley News, about the return of bald eagles to Central New York. She actually saw an eagle in her yard last year. I had never seen a bald eagle in the wild until we moved to Washington state. Now we have two nesting pairs in our neighborhood. What’s responsible for the return of this species from the brink of extinction? Science – and government.

In the mid 20th century, pesticides such as DDT were commonly used to kill mosquitoes and other damaging insects. My partner Julian remembers the crop dusters that used to spray DDT in his childhood neighborhood on the edge of the Everglades north of Miami. While effective against mosquitoes, DDT resulted in devastating effects as one moved up the food chain. Eagles and other raptors were particularly susceptible to DDT’s damage. Female eagles were unable to lay or hatch eggs into viable chicks. The early DDT research was summarized in Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring.

The Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970 by President Nixon. DDT’s use was banned in the US in 1972 in response to scientific evidence of its damage to the environment. Although banning the pesticide was a step forward, that wasn’t sufficient to increase the eagle population. Scientists around the country, including at Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology, did the heavy lifting of acquiring eagle eggs from relatively uncontaminated populations, hand-rearing the chicks, and releasing them into the wild after they fledged. According to the Oswego Valley News article, many of Cornell’s eagles were released into the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge at the north end of Cayuga Lake. Successive generations of fledglings established their own nests along the waterways of Central New York, including the Oswego River that runs through the city where I was born.

The return of bald eagles to the skies over our country was a direct result of scientific research that affected government action and funding for further research and remediation. So thank scientists by speaking up for research that benefits us, our country, and our planet. In addition, fight for science as a priority in the Federal budget.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/02/04/thanks-to-scientists/

Jan 29

Pleasant Surprises

I was walking to the Womxn’s March last week when I got two texts from my friend, BG. He’s a family doctor turned AirBnB Superhost (6 quarters in a row!). The first text was that he had a couple of food questions for me. The second was “I have some cookbooks for you.” That got my attention. Apparently one of his guests was a private chef who left him some cookbooks to lighten his load for his flight home. BG delivered them the next day. One, Cooking Dirty, was a book I already had. The others are:

Canyon Ranch Cooks, by Scott Uehlein. Recipes from the spa.

Little Foods of the Mediterranean, by Clifford A. Wright. I have his earlier book, Cucina Paradiso, that describes the Arabic influences on the cuisine of Sicily.

The French Kitchen, by Michel Roux, Jr. Updated French recipes.

The Salt Lick Cookbook, by Scott Roberts and Jessica Dupuy. Recipes from a Texas BBQ restaurant.

They’re definitely good coffee table books. Now I’ll have to see how good they are in the kitchen.

Not a bad haul. Thanks, BG!

 

 

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/29/pleasant-surprises/

Jan 28

Outrage Fatigue

The concept of compassion fatigue is well known. If someone is inundated with successive tragedies and requests for assistance, the impulse is to crawl into a hole and ignore any subsequent pleas. Recent events bring up a new buzzword: Outrage fatigue.

Outrage fatigue occurs when you’re constantly bombarded with news, tweets, emails, and the like that bring your blood pressure perilously close to stroke territory. In this case, you retreat to your refuge of cat videos and comfort food. The temptation is particularly strong here in the Seattle area: We have elected representatives who are of like mind, and calling to encourage them not to affirm a particular Cabinet nominee (or the whole lot) is preaching to the choir. We also wonder: When does this end? I can’t quit my job and become a professional protester. Such a position certainly won’t pay my rent.

I’m afraid there is no cure for outrage fatigue, especially these days. However, we may be able to manage it. Focus on one or two issues that have particular resonance for you, be it climate change, immigrant rights, or other topics, As can be seen from this previous post, I’m focusing on the suppression of government scientists and dissemination of their data. Already a few reversals have come, but vigilance is necessary to prevent backsliding. Doing a little is better than doing nothing.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/28/outrage-fatigue/

Jan 25

Speaking Up for Science

It’s been a bad week for scientists. Shortly after being inaugurated, President Trump froze grants and contracts administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Yesterday the administration instructed several government agencies, including the EPA and the Agricultural Research Service at the Department of Agriculture, to curtail communications with the public via news releases and social media. In addition, employees of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were told not to discuss new or pending regulations or guidances in public forums or with public officials. These disturbing developments bode ill for the status of government-funded science in the next few years.

The suspension of EPA contracts and grants will have ripple effects throughout the science establishment. Laboratory technicians, graduate students, and postdocs will lose jobs. Some of these students and postdocs are on student visas, meaning that the loss of funding necessitates return to their home countries. It’s difficult to write manuscripts without full access to data or hands-on mentorship, especially if English is not one’s native language. Opportunities to gather data in the field will be lost; as a result, studies may never be started or completed.

Even more troubling is the gag order on agencies. An important part of science is dissemination of data, both in peer-reviewed publications and in public forums. As the taxpayers paid for this research, taxpayers are entitled to hear about the results. If NIH officials cannot speak to elected representatives about upcoming reports, it is governmental malpractice. The people are ill-served by silence. These actions have their precedents in some of the evils of the 20th century. In regimes from the Soviets to the Taliban, the first purges came in the academic and scientific communities.

What can the scientific community do about this? Raise hell. Speak up about this egregious governmental meddling in research. Call your elected representatives, especially if institutions in your Congressional District get a large amount of funding from these agencies. (Think colleges and teaching hospitals.) Write letters to the editor of your local paper. Yes, they still get published and people do read them. Write your letters in plain English. Focus on the practical aspects of this research; for example, vaccines against the Zika virus or the impact of climate change on shorelines and wildlife. Put a local spin on your letter, especially the economic impact of these changes. Only by speaking up for science can we hope to reverse these misguided maneuvers.

Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2017/01/25/speaking-up-for-science/

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